Canker that may put an end to conkers

There's a fine stand of horse chestnut trees near where we live, except that it's not fine any more. The leaves are shrivelled and yellow, the conkers almost non-existent. It turns out, I read in the Guardian, that the trees are suffering from bleeding canker, which sounds like something that killed off medieval peasants. Liquid oozes out of gashes in the trunk, the conkers disappear, and eventually the tree dies. Half the horse chestnuts in Britain are already suffering from the disease. It's caused by a bacterium, and there is no known cure.

I didn't spend hours at school playing conkers, still less baking them in the oven. But there are few greater satisfactions, even for an adult, than breaking open the spiky green carapace and revealing the chestnut itself, so rich, so smooth, so glossy that it might almost be lit from within. The tottering world economy will, presumably, recover one day, but if we lose our horse chestnut trees - as we have lost our elms - they will never return and that is a great sadness.

• Last week I mentioned how, if you offer money to St Anthony to help you find something, and he does, you must pay your debt. Some readers have reminded me of a favourite old joke along those lines: a chap is driving to a crucial appointment, but he can't find anywhere to park. He prays to God: "If you find me a space I promise I will go to church every Sunday and make a massive contribution to the steeple fund." At that very second a car pulls out and leaves a spot. The chap says, "Oh, forget it, God, I've found one ..."

• You might have noticed that the Guardian has been doing an interesting exercise: getting MPs to vote for the most admired members of their party. Then, at the party conference, we've asked delegates to choose from the top four selections. This week our fringe meeting chose Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan, Barbara Castle and Clem Attlee, whereas the MPs had put them in a quite different order: Attlee, Bevan, Hardie and Castle. Clearly the punters liked orators and motivators, whereas the MPs were keener on legislators: those who got things through. Intriguingly they had two equal choices at fifth: Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock. For all Neil's many virtues, it seems strange that he should be rated by MPs the same as the man who was overwhelmingly the most successful election leader the party has had and who got most of them their jobs. The Tory MPs' choices were more straightforward - Thatcher, Churchill, Disraeli and Burke. We can guess that the representatives (never "delegates") will put the first two top, but I wonder in which order.

• Manchester again proved a good site for a party conference; it might lack sea air and machines dispensing crotchless knickers, but there's always a sense of vigour and excitement in the air. While waiting for a friend on the library steps I watched the Saturday night passagerio, somewhat different from that in, say, Milan or Barcelona. One woman, in a skirt that barely covered her bottom, screamed at her beau: "You want to say shit about my mother, you say it to my face, you sack of shit!" Ah, young love!

• They still have that old tradition of photographs with the famous. The late manager of the Opera House had a wall covered with them. For example, with Frank Sinatra, "to the boy from Salford from the boy from Hoboken," it said. I wondered who had scrawled that - conceivably Frank himself? At the San Carlo restaurant, where you can get good wholesome Italian food at a cost barely 50% more than in London, they have scores of these: the staff with Rio Ferdinand, with Wayne Rooney, with Ryan Giggs. You might have thought that signalling "this is a place where people who earn £120,000 a week come to eat" would put people off, but it was heaving, even in midweek, and we had to wait an hour for a table.

• The other day at lunch we had a conversation about enjoying rubbish TV - or rather, something subtly different - the kind of television you wouldn't necessarily admit to watching. I don't include Midsomer Murders, for instance - lots of us would cheerily confess to enjoying that. I mean the kind of show that makes people look at you in a rather strange way, as if they have just learned something about you they would rather not know. In my case, it is Eggheads, which usually goes out nightly on BBC2 at six.

It's a simple idea: the five eggheads in question are all quiz champions, and they take on a pub team, or a bunch of colleagues who've got together to take part. The challengers almost never win, and since there is a £1,000 rollover prize every time, they're often playing for substantial sums, which doesn't seem to help. The cunning thing about the show is that very easy questions are interspersed with occasional really tough ones, sometimes so hard they stump the eggheads. As challengers can choose whether to go first in each round, who gets which questions is largely random, and on the rare occasions a challenging team does win, it's because the eggheads have landed a couple of horrors.

Why is it so compelling? Partly it's the personalities of the eggheads: CJ, who rolls his eyes like a hanging victim, bluff and cheery Chris, Judith, who looks as if she would rather be anywhere else, Kevin, who answers all questions with dry assurance, and generous Daphne, who, when a challenger makes an obvious mistake, looks kind and distressed, as she would if a grandchild scuffed a knee. But, as I say, if I ask people to call back because I'm watching Eggheads, you can almost hear the puzzled, pitying look down the phone.